Anicca

So, did you guys read my last post ‘How would you like to discover yourself in the cards?’ and did you look up your personality, soul and shadow cards? And did they truly resonate with you?

Traditional Tarot decks – like The Rider-Waite deck, have 78 cards. 22 Major Arcana cards and 56 Minor Arcana cards, with 4 suits of 14 cards each. The Major Arcana represents major incidents, situations and learning curves of your life while the Minor Arcana cards deals with the everyday trials, tribulations, and situations of your everyday life.

The Major Arcana cards appear in your reading when you need to stop, take a moment, and pay attention to the theme in your life and the lesson that life is offering you. They also set the ‘scene’ for a reading and let the Minor Arcana cards add some more important details and some shades that relate to the bigger picture that the Major Arcana is painting.

Today, we will take on the Fool’s Journey to study the Major Arcana cards. The Fool’s Journey is a story that we can tell in order to help us get a glimpse into each Major Arcana making it easier to understand the set.

The first card in the Major Arcana is ‘0. The Fool’

1. The Magician

2. The High Priestess

3. The Empress

4. The Emperor

5. The Hierophant

6. The Lovers

QOTD: Have we covered your Soul/Personality/Shadow Card today? If yes, what impressions do you have of your cards so far?

I researched a lot about Tarot on the internet between the day I first felt myself attracted to a Tarot Deck and the day I bought my Tarot deck. And as you know, Google can be like going down a ‘Rabbit Hole’ especially if it a subject you know very little about.

I scrounged the internet for as much info as I could and tried out most of them before deciding what really worked for me. And today I am going to share them with you with a note that do what I did – take what resonates with you, and what works for you from this.

1) Let’s bust some myths:

- Tarot cards are Magic/Evil -> Tarot Decks do not have magical powers – good or bad. They are just pretty and colourful cards that have stories in them. The cards do not control or decide anyone’s life! It is the readers who bring in their own intuition to read the cards and decide what stories to tell and how to tell them. 

- You have to be a psychic to read Tarot Cards -> You don’t have to be a Psychic. All you need is your intuition. We are all born with a healthy dose of intuition – it is only a matter of developing it.

2) Choosing a Deck:

If you are choosing to learn Tarot because a deck called to you, then you already have this covered. But if that is not the case with you, I would advice you to check out multiple decks and see which one calls to you. Most decks have a ‘wow’ factor with beautiful artwork, and you need to remember to see beyond that. You’ll know it when you feel the pull, let your intuition guide you there. If you know someone who has multiple decks, check out theirs. Otherwise, you can also check out walkthrough and review videos of various decks on Youtube. 

And in case you are still unsure, here are some good beginner decks for your consideration:

The Original Rider-Waite deck is considered to be the best deck for beginners. And, for most part I agree with it because the deck has an amazing amount of details and comes with a quite clear instruction booklet.

The Light Seer's Tarot by Chris-Anne has a beautiful design where the artwork and depiction is different from that of Rider-Waite, but the cards follow the Rider-Waite concept.

Gilded Tarot Royale by Ciro Marchetti and Barbara Moore is an amazingly illustrated tarot that is both rich in its illustrations and symbolism making it easier to connect with them.

3) Handling and Maintaining Your Tarot Deck:

You need to cleanse your deck once after buying it and before starting to use it. It is also advisable to cleanse it between readings for different people and in general. Some common ways to cleanse your deck is using incense, sage you clear the energies around your Tarot. You can also leave them out in the open on full moon nights. You can also use crystals for the same.

Please keep your Tarot stored in a non-cluttered area. You can keep them in their boxes or in velvet pouches or covered in scarves to ensure that the energies are not disturbed. Black cloth or pouches are best in order to stop the cards being disturbed by external energies.

4) Connecting with Your Deck:

Handle your deck every day. Read them every day, shuffle them and in general keep them close to you. Some even suggest sleeping with the cards under your pillow in the early days. As we have learned, Tarot cards do not have any power of their own – it is your intuitive energy that helps you read them. As such, it is important that you deal with them as much as possible – especially in the beginning.

5) Learning Tarot:

Everyone has their own way of connecting and learning Tarot. In the following days, I am going to share my learnings with you all and would absolutely love it if you join me. But it is important to remember that no two people have same personality or the same learning style. So, it very well maybe that you will discover your own method of studying the cards. But few points to keep in mind are:

- Memorising the keywords is not enough. At the beginning, memorising the keywords associated with each card may be helpful, or even the only way for you to progress in your learning. But eventually it won’t be enough. So, even if you begin by memorising the keywords, take time to connect with the cards and see how each keyword is represented in the card. Only then will you be able to tell the stories that they are capable of telling.

- Always learn from 2-3 or more sources. While each card has a set of keywords, experienced Tarot readers develop their own way of interpreting not only individual cards, but also connecting the cards to make sense of a reading. All the different perspectives can help you see things more clearly and develop your own style.

I hope that this was informative for you. Next week, I will share a secret about how to find yourself in the cards and then we will delve into learning the cards one by one.

In my last post about Tarot, I have talked about my Tarot journey so far. It would be easier to give up on it right now than to start from the beginning again.

To be clear, I have to studied or practiced Tarot in over 5 years and I had left off even before I had completed studying the whole of Minor Arcana. I have lost my connection to it for most parts – if not completely and I am not sure if I remember all of what I had learned.

But I want to continue this journey and learn and discover more. And I want to start afresh.

The aspect of Tarot that attracted me the most is the fact that Tarot doesn’t claim to have any control over our lives. It is simply a tool to take a look into a person’s past, present and future. While some people claim that Tarot can predict the future, I see it as more of a tool to guide a person towards the future.

Tarot for me is a way of self-discovery and storytelling. It tells us what was, what is and what can be. It can be used to understand yourself better and take a stock of what surrounds you and how best to utilize the resources that one has. For instance, when a person is under tremendous pressure or feeling particularly vulnerable, they may not be in a state to take stock of their situation completely or pragmatically. In such situations, Tarot can guide a person to find out the blockages or the hurdles and that of the resources that are available to them but were being overlooked.

Though it is suggested that a reader should never read for themselves due to the biases that may affect the reading our personal blocks, I found it particularly enlightening to draw a card for myself each day (even if I hadn’t already studied a particular card) when I started teaching myself the art of Tarot. I would let myself look at the card and let my feelings guide to what I expected from the day. And not surprisingly, I would get different vibes from the same card on different days. It was then that I noticed that my personal moods affected how I interpreted each card. On the days I was feeling particularly positive, I would see the brighter aspects of a card and on the days, I wasn’t in the best of moods, I would align with the negative aspects of the cards.

For instance, take ‘The Fool’ card:

On a good day, I would see a person embarking on a daring adventure with a loyal companion in tow. Yet on a bad day, all I could see was a person taking a leap off an edge to the unknown.

Does the card mean one or the other? Fact is, it could be both depending the position and on the other cards in a spread. It could mean a new beginning and trust. And it could mean foolishness and naivety too.

I still do believe that a reader should not read for themselves or people they are really close to. But I did benefit from daily draws for myself while learning because paying attention to what aspects of a card I was drawn towards on a given day did give insight to my own state of mind and heart. And since I used to do it in the mornings, I could pay attention to how things were affecting me that day and how I was reacting to things. Slowly that helped me understand myself better and pay attention to my own intuition better.

It would be great to be able to become a professional reader one day. Till then I want to try I learn it better because I have never gravitated to anything more naturally before and the attraction I feel to it is not something I want to ignore any longer.

Do you have any experience with Tarot?

For as long as I can remember, I have been curious about the different branches of Occult. I remember reading up dozens of books on Palmistry while still in middle school; and reading books on Astrology during college days. They were fun parlour tricks for a time, looking at people’s hand and telling them whether they would have a love marriage or how many kids they may have and if they should be careful about their health. The novelty wore off quickly enough for me to abandon the pretence that I believed in them completely.

It is the biggest dichotomy of my life! I do not really believe in fate. Or that the planets and stars can influence our life paths from thousands of light years away; or that the story of our lives are already set in the lines on our palms. I am a control freak and as such even trying to imagine that my life path is already set and completely out of my control send me down a rabbit hole that no one should ever have to experience. And so, I do not believe that we have no control over our own lives – that they are all predetermined by the position of planets during our birth or that they are set in the lines of our palms. Yet, when I am down and feel beaten, I cannot help but wonder if there is indeed something called fate that controls us all and fighting against it to set our own paths is just setting ourselves up for failure.

Then around 2012, I discovered Tarot. It is not that I discovered its existence then, just that I was drawn to Tarot then. I was at a bookstore where they had a section for Occult and as usual, I wandered over to it after I had my fill of the Mystery/Thriller section. I felt myself drawn right to a particular tarot deck. The store had open sample decks for people to be able to explore before buying and while I checked out quite a few of them, I kept going back to one particular deck. I do not remember what deck it was, and I have not seen it again since – but the artwork on that deck told me stories. It was expensive enough for me to leave the store without buying it that day. But it stayed with me for so long (and I still remember the artwork on it till date) that I decided to give Tarot a try. Unfortunately, when I went back to the store few months later, that deck was out of stock already. I ended up buying my first deck – an original Rider-Waite deck because of course I had researched online, and most websites recommended the Rider-Waite deck for beginners.

So, it was beginning of 2013 that I started my journey with Tarot. And I must put a disclaimer here that I fully expected it to be similar to my experience with Palmistry and Astrology. I did not take any classes on tarot and instead read up online and developed my own way to learn tarot. It was a slow process because I was no longer a student. I was married, working, and struggling in those days to even stay awake after I had done my work and household chores. I would go months in between when I wouldn’t touch my deck and then go back to revising my learning before continuing just to make sure I had not forgotten in between. This continued till 2015 and then I had to give it up completely due to my work and family commitments, I had gone back to university to study and health complications.

I may not have studied Tarot for the last 5/6 years, but I could never let go of it completely either. I would still watch videos and read up articles in between. And, now that I have a bit more time (I think I do, I am never really sure) I want to get back to it seriously.

If you are wondering if it is going to be any different from my experiences with Astrology, Palmistry and even with Tarot so far – I really hope so. For one, I like how Tarot doesn’t claim to have any control over my life. And as someone whose first passion is reading, the fact that Tarot tells me stories through the cards is also a factor that makes it different from the other Occult branches that I have studied so far. I feel a connection here that I have not felt with anything before – even when I studied Graphology for a year in between.

As I go back to studying Tarot, I would really like to start at the beginning again and brush up before advancing. And I will freely admit that I need to create content for this blog. So, I thought I could maybe kill two birds with one stone – study Tarot again and chronicle my learnings in this blog.

Now, my question to you is – will you be willing to hold me accountable so that I keep at it?
If you are knowledgeable about Tarot, would you drop by with tips and ideas for me?
Or, if you have been curious about Tarot, then come learn with me?